


Your Name Burns in My Mouth

by mytimehaspassed



Series: Moon Fever [9]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Ghosts, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-21
Updated: 2012-07-21
Packaged: 2017-11-10 09:36:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/464821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mytimehaspassed/pseuds/mytimehaspassed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When he sees him again, the wound on the side of his head is a little more obvious, a little more bloody.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Your Name Burns in My Mouth

**YOUR NAME BURNS IN MY MOUTH**  
TEEN WOLF  
Derek/Stiles; Lydia/Jackson; Lydia/Jackson/Isaac  
 **WARNINGS** : ghost!AU; (so obviously) main character death; graphic depiction of decay  
 **NOTES** : Moon Fever Series

First: [You With Air](http://andletmestand.livejournal.com/26839.html)  
Second: [Nothing But Heart](http://andletmestand.livejournal.com/27050.html)  
Third: [As We Walk Into the Night](http://andletmestand.livejournal.com/27153.html)  
Fourth: [With the Heart of a Child](http://andletmestand.livejournal.com/27466.html)  
Fifth: [When it was Dark I Called and You Came](http://andletmestand.livejournal.com/27884.html)  
Sixth: [We're Sitting on a Ruin](http://andletmestand.livejournal.com/28229.html)  
Seventh: [Burn the Others Down](http://andletmestand.livejournal.com/28667.html)  
Eighth: [But Something in My Heart is Loose](http://andletmestand.livejournal.com/28870.html)

When he sees him again, the wound on the side of his head is a little more obvious, a little more bloody. 

Scott smiles and Stiles realizes that he’s in the living room, Derek and Stiles’ living room, and that Scott is sitting next to him and that Scott has his elbow balanced on the top of the couch with his hand on the side of his head that’s not bleeding out, and that he looks a little less alive than the last time Stiles saw him. His eyes are a little more sunken, a little more bruised, and his jaw is a little more see-through, and his fingers are blue. Scott reaches out a hand to Stiles, and the fingernails that are left are dirty and broken. 

Stiles looks away, but he feels Scott’s palm on his shoulder. 

“I missed you,” Scott says, and his voice is strong, betraying the decaying throat that produced it. 

If Stiles was still alive, he would start to cry. 

***

Derek leaves Peter like he left Stiles. 

He lets Jackson and Lydia and Isaac choose whether to follow him, telling them gravely one morning that being alone is not without its merits, but that it’s harder, that it’s almost impossible to resist the call of the pack during the full moon. Stiles is innocently hovering in the doorway of the kitchen, watching Derek lay his human hands out flat on the kitchen table, watching Jackson and Lydia and Isaac watch him with wide eyes. 

“But we’re not alone,” Isaac says, and he looks at Stiles briefly, and Stiles sees Jackson place a hand on Isaac’s thigh under the table. “We’ve got you.” 

“I’m not an Alpha,” Derek says, and Stiles can see him work his jaw, flexing it tight. 

“You’re closer to an Alpha than Peter is,” Lydia says, and it’s true, and she gets up from the table and places a hand on Derek’s arm. “We trust you, Derek.” 

Derek’s mouth is a long, grim line, and it only softens a little when Lydia reaches up and kisses him gently where his lips meet at the corner of his mouth. She looks at Stiles and winks, and Stiles gives her a small half smile, but he’s more uneasy about this whole pack situation than anything else. Derek places his hand on the small of Lydia’s back, and she nudges his chin with her nose and Stiles looks down at the floor, and he wishes he had made a cup of something hot to hold because he can’t feel his fingers anymore, because his feet are starting to look a little more see-through than normal. 

He gets that feeling like something’s pulling on him again, and he closes his eyes and hears someone call his name. 

***

Scott is standing by the window this time. 

Stiles looks into the kitchen, but there’s no one there. The house looks a little more hollow now, a little darker than it usually is, and Stiles can’t remember where he was before he was here, what he was doing after the talk in the kitchen. He can’t remember if its day or night, and when he looks out the window, he’s met with a dark gray sky, full of clouds threatening to open up. 

“I know you’re confused,” Scott says, and when Stiles looks back at him, he’s a little closer, halfway to the couch by now. Stiles never even heard him move. “This has to be quite a shock. I mean, am I dead or not? Am I a ghost?”

Stiles can see the outline of the wound on the side of his head, and beneath the blood, there’s the bright white of shattered bone, and Stiles looks away and swallows hard. It’s worse than Isaac’s wound, but only because it looks like it’s decaying, like the flesh is being eaten away. “You’re not a ghost,” he says. “You’re bleeding.”

“Peter told me that you would catch on quick.” Scott smiles, and it’s nothing like the Scott that Stiles used to know. “I didn’t remember that about you. I remembered your father’s rifle and I remembered the way you used to look before your mother died, when you used to smile more. But I forgot how smart you were, Stiles.”

Stiles blinks and Scott is even closer now. 

“Peter tells me that you’ve stolen something from him that never belonged to you,” Scott says. This close, Stiles can see that his mouth is full of blood, the roof dark and cavernous. This close, Stiles can see that some of his teeth are broken from the bullet that entered his skull, the bullet that left through the back of his throat, severing his spine. “That you’ve taken his pack away.”

Scott says, “And he’s given me a message to give to you.”

Stiles closes his eyes, and when he opens them again, Scott is right in front of him. Scott’s skin is black where it’s coated with dirt, and his hair is flat where the helmet had lain, and he places his hands on Stiles’ chest, and Stiles feels cold inside, feels wrong. This, whatever this is, whatever Scott is, isn’t right, and something inside of him is screaming to run away, but his feet won’t even move. 

Scott leans in close, and Stiles can smell the gunpowder from his wound, can smell the blood. “Peter says,” and here Scott pauses, moving closer to Stiles, even closer now, his lips almost touching Stiles’ lips, his nose almost touching Stiles’ nose. “Peter says that if you don’t give him back what is his, he will hunt all of you down.” 

Stiles breathes in sharply, an intake of air that he doesn’t even need, and the smell of blood surrounds him. 

Scott says, “He will hunt you down and he will kill you all.” 

Scott says, “And don’t think that you can get away, Stiles,” his heavy mouth almost closing in on Stiles’ mouth, his wet, red breath. 

Scott says, “Because he’s found a way to kill you, too.” 

***

None of them mention the weird air surrounding him. 

None of them mention the long, sad look he gets sometimes, when he’s by himself and he’s watching them talk or laugh or touch each other, Jackson brushing a kiss on Isaac’s shoulder, Lydia wiping crumbs off of Jackson’s mouth, Isaac reaching up to run his fingers through Lydia’s hair. 

None of them mention the way he ducks out of Derek’s space before Derek can kiss him sometimes, the way Jackson will try to touch his hand for some reason, but Stiles will move away, a look of hurt crawling across Jackson’s face. 

None of them mention the time he spends in the attic, trying to force tears from eyes that will never cry again. 

None of them mention the scent of betrayal that seeps out of his pores. 

***

“Tell them,” Scott says. 

He’s lying beside Stiles in bed now, where Stiles was with Derek just moments before he closed his eyes. Stiles stares up at the ceiling and counts indentations and chips in the paint. Scott has his mouth whisper close to Stiles’ ear. 

“Tell them to leave,” Scott says. He’s not malicious, and he’s not angry, he’s just adamant, his lips touching Stiles’ skin. “Tell them to go back to Peter.” 

“Why are you doing this?” Stiles asks, and his voice is hoarse. 

“Peter brought me back to haunt you, Stiles,” Scott says. “So I’m haunting you.”

Stiles closes his eyes, and Scott presses a kiss to Stiles’ cheek. 

“I guess now you know how everyone else feels.”

If Stiles were still alive, he would have felt a pain deep inside his chest, a pain that would never go away. 

***

Allison goes hunting one night with nothing more than her bare hands. Derek watches her go, looking her up and down warily as she walks out the door, before turning to Stiles and asking him if they should be keeping an eye on her. Stiles is sitting on the couch with his ghostly knees drawn up to his chest, and it takes a moment before he looks at Derek. 

“What?” he says, and his voice is somewhere in between confusion and trepidation. He feels exhausted, and that’s something that he hasn’t felt in a really long time. 

Derek goes over to the couch and sits next to him, bringing his hand up to Stiles’ arm. The heavy weight is soothing, the warmth inviting, but Stiles still feels wrong. “Are you okay?” Derek asks. 

Stiles looks down at his knees, and he breathes out one long, unnecessary breath. “I think you guys should go back to Peter,” he says, and it might have been the hardest thing he’s ever said in his entire afterlife. 

Jackson, who had been sitting in the kitchen with Lydia and Isaac, stands up straight at Stiles’ voice. “What the fuck are you talking about?” he says, and the others fall quiet. 

Derek grips Stiles’ arm and forces Stiles to look at him. “Stiles,” he says, and his voice is deep and unsteady. “What’s going on?”

Derek’s eyes go from blue to ice blue, and Stiles wants so badly to kiss him right now, to pull him close and to take him upstairs and to have him say that everything will be alright, that everything will be okay. Stiles takes another shuddering breath, and he pulls Derek’s hand off his arm. “I think you should go,” he says. “I think this was all a big mistake, and I think you should all leave right now.” 

“Stiles,” Derek says. 

Jackson starts growling from where he’s standing at the kitchen table, but Lydia marches past him, towards Stiles. Isaac is still sitting, dumbfounded, his hands out flat in front of him. 

“Stiles,” Lydia says, and her voice is sweet in the air between them. “What’s wrong?”

Stiles stands up, and he starts backing away from all of them. The lights are flickering now, and they can all hear a door upstairs slam shut on its own. “You need to leave,” he says. “Before,” and here he stops, because there is no way he could explain about Scott without sounding insane, and Stiles briefly wonders if only humans have a claim on clinical insanity, or if ghosts can be diagnosed, as well. 

“Before what?” Derek says. He looks hurt, his arm frozen in the air from where Stiles pried it off of his arm, his unnaturally blue eyes staring at Stiles. “What’s going on, Stiles? What happened?” 

Lydia is next to Derek now, her hands out in front of her, reaching for Stiles, and Stiles instinctively moves back again. A light bulb in the lamp beside her bursts, and she stops, and places a palm on Derek to keep him still, too. “Talk to us, Stiles,” she says, and Jackson and Isaac are still in the kitchen, bewildered. 

“I can’t,” he says. The chandelier in the hallway is swinging wildly around and around. “I can’t talk about it, but I need you guys to leave before anything bad happens.” 

They hear a shattering sound upstairs, and Stiles guesses that it’s one of the windows. Jackson is still growling, and Isaac is next to him now, his hands buried in Jackson’s hoodie. Derek is looking directly at Stiles, though, his mouth quivering when he opens it. 

“Stiles, please,” Derek says, and he’s laughably afraid now, and if Stiles weren’t so sure of what might happen if they stay, he would make a joke to try and lighten the mood. “Tell me what’s going on. You’ve been distant for days. What happened?” 

“Nothing happened,” Stiles says, and they all know it’s a lie. The chandelier keeps spinning, and it’s dangerously close to falling and smashing into the floor. “I just changed my mind. I want all of you to go now. Go home to Peter.” 

“That was never our home and you fucking know it, Stiles,” Isaac says, and it’s the first time he’s spoken since this all began, and Stiles looks at him and feels that thing deep inside himself, that thing that pulls him away from Derek and the others, that thing that pulls him toward Scott. 

“I’m sorry,” Stiles says, and it’s for this, and it’s for everything. “I’m so sorry.” 

And when the chandelier falls, it makes a spectacular crash. 

***

The next time Stiles sees Scott, it’s not at the house. 

He opens his eyes and he’s in the woods, with grass tickling the underside of his feet and trees surrounding him on all sides, and the swift chill of a breeze rustling through the leaves and branches. The sky is dark and cloudy, and when he looks behind him, he can’t see any roads or houses. 

“Hello?” He calls out, and his voice echoes. 

“Hello, Stiles,” Scott says, and Stiles turns to look at him, and he takes a step back when he realizes that they aren’t alone. 

“I’m glad you could make it, Stiles,” Peter says. He smiles, and Stiles feels empty. 

“I did what you asked,” he says. “I told them to leave.” 

Peter laughs, but none of this is funny. “I heard,” he says. “Although, I don’t think they’re as receptive as I’d like them to be.” 

Scott is standing right by Peter, his shoulders slumped, his head tilted down, and he looks worse than Stiles has ever seen him. The wound has eaten itself all the way to Scott’s face, where his cheeks are just starting to turn black. His mouth is a crooked, decaying line, and the blood that oozes from his head smells old and rank. Stiles winces when he catches Scott’s gaze and quickly looks away. 

“What else do you want me to do,” Stiles says. 

And Peter laughs again. “That’s why I like you, Stiles. You’re always so eager to please.” He moves closer, and Stiles’ feet feel as heavy as boulders, and he knows he wouldn’t be able to move, even if he tried. “I can see why Derek likes you, even if you aren’t his type.” 

And Stiles can’t help himself. “What do you mean I’m not his type?”

Peter drops the smile. “Derek will be an Alpha someday,” he says, and his words crawl over Stiles’ skin like ice. “He needs a mate that’s a werewolf, not a fucking ghost. What good are you to the pack, Stiles? What can you do for us?”

Stiles doesn’t say anything, and the anchor around his feet grows heavier. 

And then it’s like a light switches back on, the air between them feels lighter, and Peter smiles once more. “But maybe you can do something for us. I have one more thing that I need you to do.”

Stiles looks at Scott, and Scott tries to lift his mouth to grin, but there’s a hole in the side where his cheek used to be. 

Peter says, “I need you to do me just one more favor.” 

Peter says, “I need you to kill Allison Argent.”


End file.
